USS Midnight

[Darkwing]

So, outta curiosity, do renders start taking longer the longer they've been going? I mean I'm rendering frames now that only would take 15 minutes to render, but 147 frames into the animation, each frame is about 45 or so minutes rendering and there's nothing going on except a flyby. And I did notice the frames taking longer and longer to render. So, does AM or my Macbook need to take a break every once in a while or something?

[Meowx]

There's a lot of different reasons frames can take longer to render. It's a flyby, perhaps you're rendering part of the flyby where the ship is really close to the camera? Shots with objects close to the camera generally take longer to render than ones with objects a distance away.

[Darkwing]

Yeah I figure that, I'm talking when pretty much the same amount and even the same spot take longer to render frame to frame. I mean there's nothing actually overly intensive about this model, just a lot of decaling

[HomeSlice]

Sometimes its just impossible to know....

I've been rendering a scene with one character against an alpha channel. The character has Hair and its eyes have transparency and index of refraction. The camera slowly moves closer to the character's face. Renders were zipping right along at ~5min per frame until the camera got a certain distance from the character's face, then all of a sudden it slowed waaaaaay down to several hours per frame. I'm still not exactly sure what is causing it, but it isn't crashing A:M, so I've just been letting it render.

[Gerry]

I had a problem with my Bus Stop render where I would let my Mac render all night and only had like 20 frames done in the morning. As Robcat pointed out, the machine was set to sleep after a half hour! I had *assumed* that with a render running, the machine would keep cranking, but no, it was going to sleep on schedule. Could it be something like that?

 

Oh and nice work, Chris! It really is a professional job!

[Darkwing]

Heh, I ran into that problem about a year ago with the macbook going to sleep. I have since rectified that issue I think ultimately it's just this laptop isn't really powerful enough to render that much stuff

[Darkwing]

Oh and it got so far that I stopped it just so I could do other things. So I played it back and the animation was purely awful so I've re-set the stage and am now rendering again

[HomeSlice]

Oh and it got so far that I stopped it just so I could do other things. So I played it back and the animation was purely awful so I've re-set the stage and am now rendering again

 

If you are just doing test renders to see how effects and stuff animate, render to a low resolution like 320x240. Also set multipass to ON and set "number of passes" to 1. That will render without antialiasing. That and the smaller render size will speed things up considerably.

[Gerry]

Yeah Chris, it sounds like you're getting too excited about seeing a final render and not test rendering first! I'm sure most of us have been there. But for the rendering hit you're getting, it would be well worth it to test, at least some short sequences.

[Darkwing]

Well that was the thing actually. When I played it in the choreography things looked lined up where I wanted them. But the render didn't go so well, I must've moved some objects without realizing. Anyways, the whole look I didn't like anyways, was way too much red. This new render is much better

[Meowx]

I had a problem with my Bus Stop render where I would let my Mac render all night and only had like 20 frames done in the morning. As Robcat pointed out, the machine was set to sleep after a half hour! I had *assumed* that with a render running, the machine would keep cranking, but no, it was going to sleep on schedule. Could it be something like that?

 

Oh and nice work, Chris! It really is a professional job!

Haha, so much this. I've been turning off auto-sleep on every one of my Macs since I first started 3D for that exact reason.

[Darkwing]

Woot, finally!

 

 

Seems that it doesn't really become apparent until exported, but my renders are looking blotchy, even at 720p with 9 pass rendering, stuff to work on in the future. But yeah, wrapping thins one up, now it goes off to my friend

[robcat2075]

that looks sharp!

 

but I couldn't read the opening text, it was too dark.

[Darkwing]

Yeah, I knew that would be a problem going into it, I did it anyway, just for kicks It didn't help that the glow on the letter went all fuzzy and exported considerably darker than what they were, but oh well, the ship's what we're looking at anyways